There are lots of things to think about before heading to the AOR. You need to brush upon the SCRA. The USERRA. You gotta decide if someone should have power of attorney while you’re gone. You have to remember a notarized letter for dependent children to travel out of the country and you need to square away your will…but what about the passwords to all the accounts on the desktop though, or the fact that Bob up the street still owes you $200?

There’s a vast amount of information in modern life. It’s hard to gather in one place and harder to get around to doing it. This is as true for day to day life as it is for that last hectic week before you actually deploy. You need to organize the little things, and not just before you go overseas.

· What are the dates of the automatic payments coming out of your account?

To that end comes the Big Book of Everything (Mark II), from freelance writer Erik Dewey. The military loves continuity books almost as much as it loves acronyms. This is a continuity book for you. The BBoE is designed to remind you what information you need organized and to actually keep it organized. There are pages for passwords and logins and blocks for your extended medical history and spaces for things we’d frankly never remember on our own.

Though BBoE Mk II is suitable for everyone, Mr. Dewey has contacted several military friends for advice on information needs pertinent to your military career…your family care plan, DD214, previous EPRs maybe, SGLI information, etc. In the meantime, we like the Big Book of Everything so much we set it up here for you to download. The BBoE is available as an editable PDF as well as an Excel spreadsheet.